Gisèle Pelicot has given us the gift of showing things as they really are. Now we have to work out how to live.

This is probably my last newsletter of 2024, so - as well as saying Happy Christmas and Happy New Year - I want to begin by saying a huge thank you to all my subscribers. Your numbers hit the 2,000 mark this week, and I’m incredibly grateful to you for your feedback, comments and reflections, and for giving me this audience and framework by which I can order my thoughts each week. I’m sending especial thanks to my paid subscribers for supporting my work financially, and also for reassuring me that someone considers that my work is worth paying for! Thank you so much: I am very grateful xxx

If anyone else has the means and would like to consider going paid, then, for now, a paid subscription is simply making a much-appreciated donation towards my writing. The same content reaches everyone, because I want my current work - which is about how women can survive, and even find ways of thriving, in an era of backlash - to reach as wide an audience as possible, and especially those women who do not have the means to pay for a subscription. So I’m particularly grateful to those who support me and this project. I’m, as ever, also on Twitter (@drrachelhewitt), Bluesky (@rachelhewitt.bsky.social) and Instagram (@drrachelhewitt) - albeit very sporadically - so do come along and say hello there too.

Right, that’s the housekeeping done.

I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to write a newsletter this week, because I have been so very exhausted. I’m sure there are myriad contributing factors. For one thing, I’ve been recently diagnosed with hypothyroidism and Vit D deficiency, which - along with the propensity of GPs to trivialise women’s tiredness (they even have a dismissive acronym for entering it into patients’ notes: TATT (or Tired All The Time)) - will be the subject of a later newsletter, I’m sure. And there’s obviously all the Christmas mental and physical load. But I think my teary exhaustion is also closely related to the ending of the trial against Dominique Pelicot for instigating the mass rape of his then wife, Gisèle Pelicot; and against a fraction of the men who raped her drugged, unconscious body. The guilty verdicts are in, and the sentences have been passed, but this isn’t a cause for celebration. Instead, I think there’s a widespread sense of, ‘well, what now? How do we [ie. women] live now, knowing what we now know about men?’ It’s an utterly exhausting question to contemplate.